French Foreign Legion and After
At the age of sixteen, Gotovina left home to become a sailor. In 1973, before turning eighteen, he joined the French Foreign Legion under the pseudonym of Andrija Grabovac and became a member of the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e REP) after qualifying at the Training School in Pau before joining the elite Commandos de Recherche et d'Action en Profondeur (CRAP) now renamed as Parachute Commando Group (GCP). It was there he met Dominique Erulin, brother of the Colonel Philippe Erulin, who would be his friend and partner in future missions. In the next few years, he participated in Foreign Legion operations in Djibouti, the Battle of Kolwezi in Zaire, and missions in the Ivory Coast, becoming Colonel Erulin's driver. After five years of service, he left the Legion with the rank of caporal-chef; he obtained French citizenship in 1979.
He subsequently worked for a variety of French private security companies during the 1980s, among them KO International Company, a filial of VHP Security, known as a cover for the Service d'Action Civique (SAC), and was at this time responsible for the security of far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen. In 1981, together with Dominique Erulin, he helped editor Jean-Pierre Mouchard (a close friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen) organize a commando operation to free his press in La Seyne-sur-Mer, occupied by CGT trade-union strikers.
According to French police records, he became involved in criminal activities, which led to arrest warrants being issued for robbery and extortion; it has been reported that he served at least one two-year prison sentence, though this has been denied by his attorneys. Dominique Erulin claims the accusations were a political ploy made up by the left-wing factions allied with President François Mitterrand. Towards the end of the decade he moved to South America, where he provided training to a number of right-wing paramilitary organizations, notably in Argentina and Guatemala. He met his future wife, Ximena Dalel, in Colombia and had a daughter.
Arrested during a travel to France (Paris), he was sentenced in 1986 to five years of prison by Paris' Cour d'assise. He was freed the next year, "in circumstances showing that he was benefiting from very particular protections". However, Gotovina's lawyers have submitted a brief to the International War Crimes Tribunal alleging that Gotovina was in fact framed by a criminal police group loyal to Francois Mitterrand, a group which was convicted for official misconduct by French courts in 2005.
Read more about this topic: Ante Gotovina
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